Tag Archives | Marco Rubio

The United States has launched air strikes against the Syrian regime, but do we have a strategy for Syria yet? Judging from the past few days, we have too many. Launching a couple dozen missiles to blow up a runway at an airbase controlled by the regime may or may not sound impressive, but in […]

If you want to know where the Republican Party is at this point in the primaries, consider two statements that bookended the day on Super Tuesday: the morning’s revelations about Ben Carson’s thoughts on Donald Trump—followed, in the evening, by Marco Rubio’s concession speech. Let’s start with Carson, who recently withdrew from the race and […]

A lot of people have been telling Marco Rubio that he had to start attacking Donald Trump. Well, he did that last night—and with devastating effectiveness. He was particularly effective in catching the way Trump tries to filibuster every response by repeating the same half-dozen catchphrases. That gave Rubio the perfect opportunity to take the […]

Presidential primaries are without a doubt the most annoying part of the political process. They stir up all of the blind, bitter partisanship of the general election—but applied to far narrower differences in ideology and personality. A lot of people are completely committed to their guy (I’m assuming Carly is out of the running now), […]

This is a national security election now. That’s the upshot for domestic American politics of the massive terrorist attack in Paris. Is it too early to “politicize” this, to assess its impact on the presidential contest? Sorry, but this is what politics is for, particularly presidential politics. We’re picking the next commander-in-chief, someone who will […]

After this week’s debate, Marco Rubio unveiled his newest attack ad. This video is, of course, an old philosophy joke that’s been floating around the Web for years. But it just may have a point. It turns out that the nineteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant really is wrong for America (and wrong on all those […]

The Republicans head tonight into their fourth debate. Hopefully this one will go a little better, seeing as how Fox Business will be eager to stick it to its rival, CNBC, which famously bungled the last one. And this showdown comes just as the race is really clarifying. Based on the last few weeks of […]

The general consensus is that the Republican debate hosted last night by CNBC was a train wreck. And yeah, it was kind of a train wreck. The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway had warned that CNBC was choosing for their moderator a total pro-Hillary hack, John Harwood. Boy, did that turn out to be right. He and […]

The latest polls continue to track Donald Trump’s decline in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Before the last debate, he was poking above 30 percent in the RCP average, seemingly on his way up to higher numbers. Now, most polls show him flopping down into the low 20s. An NBC/WSJ poll recently showed […]

The candidacy of Donald Trump, built on a foundation of openly contemptuous anti-immigrant rhetoric, has invigorated the anti-immigration right. In addition to the cruder appeals—about foreigners “taking our jobs,” or outright appeals to racism (which Trump’s candidacy has brought out of the woodwork on social media)—there is a more subtle argument that has gained a […]